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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23221591">The Road to Arden</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdenDrifter/pseuds/ArdenDrifter'>ArdenDrifter</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>DICKENS Charles - Works, Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens, X-Men - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dyscalculia, Family, Friendship, Gen, Generational Trauma, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Magical Realism, Multi, Mutant Powers, Neurodiversity, Other, Physical Disability, Post-Concussion Syndrome, Prejudice, Religious Conflict, Shakespeare, Survivor Guilt, bildungsroman, parenting</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 11:15:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>11,582</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23221591</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdenDrifter/pseuds/ArdenDrifter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicholas works up the courage to tell his oldest children about his travels with Smike.  Or, how Micah Nickleby became Smike, and Smike became Arden.  Disability themes, survivor’s guilt, and Bildungsroman abound.  Can be read as an X-Men prequel if you tilt your head sideways and squint.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kate Nickleby/Frank Cheeryble, Madeleine Bray/Kate Nickleby, Nicholas Nickleby/John Browdie, Nicholas Nickleby/Madeleine Bray</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. “You remember your cousin’s patched jacket, collar torn, folded neatly and laid upon your desk.”</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Content Note: Centers on themes of abledness and prejudice. Mentions canon-typical Victorian social problems, including infant mortality, miscarriages, institutional neglect, and caning in schools. Depicts long-term and generational impacts of violence and trauma without depicting the violence itself. Brief, non-graphic mention of a child's suicide attempt.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You will tell the story of your shame exactly once. You and your wife are enjoying a quiet walk through the hazel wood, sipping in the heady hay-cut fragrance of a golden summer evening, when you overhear the children playing by the standing stones. There is a game they play—even Edmund, who is nearly thirteen—placing dead flowers on your cousin's tomb to watch the withered husks green and bloom afresh. Sometimes they weave crowns that root into their hair, adorn themselves in living finery, and put on airs as Puck or Lady Oberon. Sometimes they flit through the upper canopy piping like birds, and you watch from the earth with your heart in your throat, and on occasion a branch catches a child before he falls. Your cousin has given them this: the small, sturdy miracles of childhood, a secret guarded jealously against adult indifference.</p><p>You do not intend to eavesdrop—you have some sense of propriety about such things, after all—but your daughter Kate has a voice that carries and ambitions for the stage, and as you draw close to the family graveyard your wife shushes you. Her finishing school has recently taken on a new pupil, a girl of thirteen, harelipped and unmarriageable and sharp as a tack, and though it's been two days since you returned from London you have not yet made the child's acquaintance. You do not yet know whether she is wary of headmasters or handsome gentlemen—or whether, perhaps, she has noticed the second shadow you cast in the forest, and knows enough to be frightened. And so you have given her distance, as you can, and you have let your wife puzzle out the best approach for her.</p><p>Little Kate is telling the newcomer how you rescued your cousin from a French dungeon and brought him home to your family in Arden. On her lips, you'd expect a tale plundered from Dumas novels and newspaper serials, but instead you hear your cousin's story, word for word, just as he told it in life. It may be the first time you've heard her repeat a story just as she heard it, without romance or embellishment.</p><p>Cold in his grave these past ten years, and still your cousin spreads <em>this </em>account of your history together, because—</p><p>(Because he never <em>could</em> understand the shame in your eyes, when he spoke of all you'd done for him. Because his crookedness and infirmity lay on his body for all to see, and you took it as a sign of feeble-mindedness. Because you carried your own ignorance and stupidity invisibly, under the comely face of a gentleman. Because he never guessed all the ways you craved his forgiveness. Because he never forgave you in life and now he never will.)</p><p>It's not the story that breaks you, the familiar recitation on someone else's lips. It's the <em>pride</em>you hear in your daughter's voice.</p><p>You call the older children into your study after supper: Edmund, straight-backed and sober, harboring a quiet interest in the priesthood; Little Kate the thespian, ten years old and hungry to see the world; and the nine-year-old twins, Dora and Pearl, who inherited their mother's head for business and your uncle's mercenary humor.</p><p>It is just as well that Jackaby is away on tour with the Crummles, making her debut as an illusionist's apprentice. You cannot face her with this.</p><p>You have decided against watered brandy to fortify yourself—but, mindful of the awkward formality of the affair, you've built up a small fire in the grille and set a kettle to steep with chamomile and linden-blossom and a few indulgent lumps of sugar. The twins shuffle their feet, now and again stealing nervous glances at one another. You do not know how to put them at their ease. In the past, only the gravest of family business has warranted a conference in your inner sanctum: the loss of their infant brother to scarlet fever; a late-term miscarriage that nearly carried off their Aunt Kate; the decision to foster young Master Browdie while his family farm suffered ash-blight and a year without summer; the quiet passing of Old Noggs in his stone cottage down at the bottom of the orchard; the adoption of a stick-thin girl you fished from the belly of a transport ship.</p><p>Your son seems to cotton on, bless him, when you arrange the bone china tea service, the one reserved for business partners and the petty aristocracy of country gentlemen who come, on occasion, to beg advice in their sundry fiscal misadventures—advice, to be honest, that your wife is far better suited to dispense. Edmund squares his shoulders and tries to meet your eye, girding himself for what he hopes will be his first serious conversation, man-to-man, as your equal. His voice has only just started to break and it breaks your heart, a little, when he asks your leave to serve tea on your behalf.</p><p>"You have taken my cousin as your playmate these past years," you begin, haltingly, when you manage to find your voice. You dare a glance upward from your hands, which you have knit firmly in your lap so that your children may not see them tremble. In that moment, you see the character of the adults they shall become. Your son is about to admit any wrongdoing, real or imagined, and insist that his sisters are not to blame—that he was, after all, the oldest and quickest of conscience, that he was responsible for putting a stop to a game gone too far. Denials and fabrications have sprung fully-formed to Little Kate's lips, while Pearl waits with a more plausible fiction to confess, haltingly, when her sister's stories grow too wild. But Dora—little Dora, slight and wild—is studying you intently, hanging on every word. You hold up a hand to stay your offspring's protests. "I have no doubts the dear lad's been as good a friend to you as ever he was to me. I do not begrudge you that; it is the closest thing to a happy childhood that is within my power to give him."</p><p>You have never openly discussed Little Kate's knack for speaking with the dead, not even with your wife. You have never spoken with <em>any</em> of the children about the peculiar gifts that run in your family, nor the true purpose behind the finishing school.</p><p>"What is this, then?" your eldest daughter inquires, badly wrongfooted. "Is this the talk where you tell us how fast we're growing up and that it's time put away childish things and—"</p><p>You shake your head, though in a way she's right. "No, dearest. I called you here because—"</p><p>(Because you wronged him, your sweet-faced cousin. Because that grim January in a squalid corner of Yorkshire haunted your youth and haunts you still, and you must suppress a full-body shudder when your wife's new pupils mistake you for their headmaster. Because you were nineteen years old and a selfish thoughtless bastard and consumed utterly by the freshness of your grief. Because you were nineteen years old and believed, <em>truly</em> believed, that you could salve his misery by comporting yourself as a gentleman.)</p><p>Your son presses a fragrant cup of tea into your hands. You hold it delicately, like a wounded baby bird. The earthy haymeadow fragrance steadies you, a little. You never quite remember the moment you fly out of your body—only this, always this, the helpless disorientation of return.</p><p>"Listen—Kate, Ed—" You are beginning to regret inviting the twins; they are too young, God knows, for all this; but if you had excluded them they would have listened at keyholes and formed their own opinions on the matter. It is better, you assure yourself, to have them here to ask their questions—but you cannot bear to look at them. "It is necessary, now that you're getting older and coming into full possession of your talents, to acquaint you with certain facts regarding our family. And chief among them is this: a ghost—even an honest one—cannot tell you the whole truth about itself. Its perspective and memory, its sense of its own personal history is...constrained, my loves, by the selfsame loyalties that bind it to earth."</p><p>There. That is a beginning. Your voice did not shake; nor did your hands. You sip your tea with the composure of a gentleman and a father.</p><p>"You must understand, my cousin loved us—<em>loves</em> us—very much...me and Kate, to be sure, but also your grandmother, and Old Noggs, and—" Your glance flickers to Edmund, but you do not betray yourself. You will tell him, perhaps, when he is older; or pen a letter of confession to include with your bequests. "What I mean to say is that when he tells you about our travels together, our adventures on the road or with the little acting troupe, you must understand that he remembers only the parts that strengthen his love for us. He would have you admire me, because has forgotten my mistakes. But that sort of—flattery—it does not gentle you, nor prepare you for the world." You bite back another dim-witted injunction against pride. Lord knows, the girls get enough of that from Edmund, and Edmund from the vicar. "My own father, when he died, left me ill-prepared for the world," you say instead. "I would not do the same to you."</p><p>"He said you saved him from that—was it a workhouse, then, away up north?" your son inquires.</p><p>Someday. Someday you will tell him. He should hear the truth from you, though there is something in it of sorcery.</p><p>"Auntie Kate says it was a school," her namesake volunteers, "and <em>Mother</em> says—"</p><p>"It wasn't a school," you put in quietly, because—</p><p>(Because you were worthless at sums and the headmaster was illiterate. Because he appointed you head teacher because you looked to have a strong arm and he was satisfied you could hold a stick. Because out behind the hog pen lay a graveyard marked with nameless crosses, a child's handiwork of sticks and twine. Because the water-pump froze solid and so did the earth, and the grey little corpses, pupils dead of want and disease, lay stacked against the back shed like so much cordwood. Because the wild dogs roaming out on the moor grew fat all winter, and lost their fear of men. Because when the headmaster took on a new pupil, he asked the guardians to pack six sets of clothes, two pairs of shoes, and a razor for shaving.)</p><p>You set down your tea. Edmund's scooted closer to you on the horsehair sopha, almost knee-to-knee. It seems he would quite like to reach out and clasp your hand in his, but he doesn't move a muscle. You cup the back of his head, ruffling his hair with distracted affection. Even this late in summer, with a fire in the grate and a belly full of hot tea and your children loosening their collars in the close damp heat, the chill of that place seems to seep into your bones.</p><p>"<em>He</em> didn't call it a school, though, did he?" Pearl pipes up.</p><p>"No, he called it something French," Little Kate muses. "Had to do with human sacrifice and how they built churches and forts and castles back in olden times, with bones to guard the foundations."</p><p>"<em>Oubliette</em>," Dora says softly, and her siblings fall silent because our little Dora never speaks unless she is very, <em>very</em> certain. "It's a kind of prison. I already asked Mother."</p><p>You close your eyes for a moment, withholding a wince. "It means <em>forgetting-place</em>." You seize upon a sudden inspiration, safer territory than the story you mean to tell. "My first paid employment, when I was a young man, was with a troupe of traveling-players some distance from Portsmouth. My employer, Mr. Crummles, set me the task of translating—well, plagiarizing, really—a script he'd picked up in Paris.</p><p>"I'm afraid my French was little better then than it is now—I had to make do with a great deal of guesswork and fabrication. My cousin hadn't any real knack for languages, but he endeavored to help me all the same, and he turned out to have some talent for the guesswork and fabrication part. In the course of our labors, we discovered an unfamiliar word, <em>oubliette</em>, and interpreted <em>forgetting-place</em> quite literally. In our script, the setting was a kind of otherworld whose people remember the things we've forgotten and think the thoughts that slip our minds. Our resident dramaturge thought it brilliant and inspired; I was too embarrassed to tell her the truth. But my cousin, when he found out the real meaning—" It was the first time you saw him cast his shadow forth from his body, or how sick he got after. "He repeated the word over and over to himself when he thought no one was looking. That is to say, he was still recovering from the effects of concussion, and his memory came and went and he knew it. Up to that point, I hadn't realized how afraid he was of forgetting."</p><p>The first time he met your sister Kate, he told her you rescued him from an <em>oubliette</em>. <em>I didn't</em>, you wanted to tell her, but he was so <em>proud</em> of himself. Proud that he'd learned a little French. Proud that he had this one word to recite and cherish, one word that so neatly encapsulated the wrongs he'd suffered and survived. You'd have sooner nailed your tongue to the floor than embarrassed him in his moment of triumph.</p><p>"So it <em>was</em> a dungeon you rescued him from," Little Kate concludes with satisfaction.</p><p>"Prison," Pearl corrects her, sipping daintily at her tea.</p><p>"Yes, but they <em>mean</em> the same thing, and doesn't dungeon sound so much more...<em>swashbuckling</em>and <em>perilous</em>?" She's nearly bouncing on her seat, and you can see her fabulist theatrical faculties picking over the details you've disclosed thus far, assembling them into some thrilling adventure to be plundered for make-believe games with the village children or wild tales for Jackaby.</p><p>You can hardly blame her. At her age, you'd have done the same thing. She is ten years old and has not yet eaten the fruit of the tree, God help her.</p><p>"The estate up in Yorkshire was no dungeon—nor was it a prison," you add swiftly, catching the smirk of triumph that passes between the twins. "Nor was it a school, though they called it that." <em>Oubliette</em>'s not far off, come to think of it. "I came to my employment ignorant of its nature and its purpose. And the children there...I'd never met <em>anyone</em> with such inexplicable talents. We take it for granted in this family that such gifts are often marked by strangeness or infirmity; but nobody knew that then. There was stigma. An infant born with a cleft palate could doom his sister's hopes for a suitable marriage, or his father's business ventures; and so families—especially the wealthy ones, with dynasties at stake and fortunes to lose—would pay the headmaster twenty pounds a year to make these children disappear. And if these boys perished of want or disease before attaining their majority, if they never lived long enough to claim their inheritance, well, it was tragic to be sure but the parents told themselves it was for the best. There were so-called 'boys' schools' just like it tucked away in remote corners all over the north, and Yorkshire most especially."</p><p>You never found out what happened to the girls.</p><p>Pearl and Dora are studying you intently, hands clasped together, a tense electric resonance thrumming between them. Little Kate looks like she's about to be sick. You force yourself on. "You <em>must</em> understand who I was to those boys. I was not hired to be their teacher. I was hired to be their warden while we waited for them to die."</p><p>"We?" Edmund asks weakly.</p><p>You glance around at your children. "The families," you clarify. "The headmaster. The proprietors. The investors. The churchmen. The coach-drivers. The innkeepers. Even the neighbors, most likely. It was a very lucrative business, making children disappear. Everyone knew. <em>Everyone</em>. But in those boys they saw only burdens to society—lame or feeble, prone to fits of epilepsy or inexplicable criminality, or marked more invisibly by tragedy or bastard birth or genius, or else so blunted in their natural faculties as to scarcely qualify as human. Nobody realized those boys might be—possessed of rare talents."</p><p><em>You</em> didn't realize, not until you went to live among them. Not until that first night, when a blind pox-marked youth sculpted a kitten out of living shadow, and played with it there in the gathering dark. And then there was the mute child you caught whispering inside your head, and the crawling infant who shattered windows with his nightmares; the boy who forgot mealtimes and chores and every last word of his lessons, who forgot even his own gravity until the headmaster's wife reminded him; the prophet of petty losses, who visited you in dreams; the one who tossed benches and desks when he was frightened, and could not resist an impulse for petty filching; the one who caught sunbeams in his hands; the one who spoke all the languages of birds, and threw himself from the roof while you slept a few feet away.</p><p>And your cousin, God help him, he was more powerfully gifted than any of them.</p><p>The confession falls out of you in a sudden rush. "The truth is, I didn't save him."</p><p>(Because you didn't stop them, not at first. Because they kept him hog-tied in that freezing root cellar for the better part of nine hours while you wrote <em>letters</em> petitioning his release, one upstanding gentleman to another. Because they ordered you to stand by your desk and watch and you obeyed like a whipped dog. Because when they stripped him, when they finally managed to make him beg, he looked to you for help and you stared resolutely at the wood grain on your desk. Because he carried that scar for the rest of his life, and you were the reason it was there. Because he lies cold in the ground between your father and your infant son. Because you didn't try to save him—you didn't think you could—until you heard him <em>scream</em>.)</p><p>Later—much later, in those months of melancholy after his kidnapping and escape—he told your sister about that day. He told that story over and over, rehearsing it like one of Mr. Crummles' scripts, though his head had healed by then and there was no longer any danger of forgetting. He said that you personally cut him down, eased an arm under his shoulders, and half-carried, half-dragged him to safety.</p><p>You don't remember it that way.</p><p>Your memory exists in fragments: blood on your face and blood in your mouth and dead weight in your arms; the ugly, wracking sobs that shuddered to life at your touch, the ones that might have been pleading, but that you feared were your name; shouting <em>Take him, take him</em><em>now</em> to two of the sturdier-looking boys—and <em>oh</em>, how the children scurried to obey, now their tormentors lay insensible at your feet, now that it was you with cane in hand and your coarse animal nature on full display.</p><p>What else?</p><p>A pen knife on the floor. Your cousin's patched jacket, torn at the collar, folded neatly and laid upon your desk. But you don't remember his state of undress; you don't remember cutting him down. Had they tied him, or pinned him by the neck, or relied instead on his trembling obedience? Certainly you saw bruising at his wrists, after—but that might have been from his ordeal in the root-cellar, or being shackled to the floor of the mistress's riding-cart.</p><p>He told your sister that you tied him to the back of a dappled grey donkey, carried him twenty miles to the nearest inn, bathed his injuries in oil and wine, kept watch by his bedside as he recovered. If his story resembled too much the Good Samaritan on the road to Damascus, Kate was too kind to say anything. You reasoned with him, later, that there could not have been a donkey; had you stolen one from the headmaster's stables, the mistress of the house would have hunted you down and seen you hanged for theft. Still, your cousin <em>swore</em> there was donkey—grey, he insisted, and dappled.</p><p>Or had it been a horse?</p><p>"Father?" Edmund nudges you. You've been drifting again. It takes you a moment to remember where you are.</p><p>(The fire in the grille. The copper kettle. Moisture beading on the windowpane. Flames that cast two shadows, not one.)</p><p>"Forgive me," you murmur. "I know this is not what you hoped to hear, but I did not save my cousin from that place. He saved himself." You take a deep, steadying breath. There are a thousand ways you might justify yourself; it is a cold and terrible thing, you realize, to tell the truth instead. "He had no choice but to save himself, because when I fled the estate I left him there."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. "Your own talent is a crabbed, mean little thing, unworthy of notice."</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Nicholas has dyscalculia.  Smike has godlike power.  The Nickleby children have a great many questions.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Your own talent is a crabbed, mean little thing, unworthy of notice. That, in itself, is a blessing beyond price. It has allowed you to walk the halls of money and power without drawing unwanted attention, to trade on your handsome face and good name to endorse Arden Hall Young Ladies' Academy to investors and despairing parents. Even when you must purchase a child's indenture from workhouse or transport yard, you have remained above suspicion. It has, in short, granted you the freedom to move unfettered in the world, to act as your conscience deems fit.</p><p> </p><p>You are marked by an intractable difficulty with numbers and sums—no small deficiency, for a man of business, but invisible enough. Your employers have turned a blind eye to this vulnerability: any fourteen-year-old apprentice can balance accounts, but your penchant for unconscious prophecy is less easily come by.</p><p> </p><p>Kate insists that mathematics is at its core a mode of prediction; you arrive at prediction by a radically different method, she says, one that proves incompatible with the conventional stratagem. She reminds you over and over, as though you are one of her pupils, that your faculties are by no means deficient, merely different.</p><p> </p><p>You have always sent the children to Kate with their questions. Peculiar talents are, after all, the chief study of her adult life. Her husband Frank has procured her a small medical library, and the elder Cheerybles send her the most recent publications from Paris and Zurich; and then there are her own children, and yours, not to mention her pupils at school and the Crummles' motley entourage. On occasion, you even glimpse Little Kate acting as her medium for impassioned debates with your cousin's ghost.</p><p> </p><p>But you have spoken too little, it seems, of talent and infirmity. It has become a forbidden topic between you and your children, too painful—perhaps too dangerous—to acknowledge. You had intended a tidy presentation of family history, but it has struck the heart of the silence between you. To explain your cousin's life, you must also explain what was done to children like them.</p><p> </p><p>You trace the bare outlines of your confession. Your thoughtless promise, little more than smoke and fairytale, to meet your cousin out in the wide world, to help him however you could once you were both free of that wretched place. His desperation, despair, and flight; the bitter cold that night, and the next, when you prayed he would freeze to death before his masters caught him. His apprehension and punishment, when your temper frayed and finally snapped. Your graceless brawl with the headmaster: you had never before raised a hand to your fellow man and felt sick with it, a bone-deep revulsion you could direct at no one but yourself. And the boys—Lord, how they looked at you, horror and delight and nausea and awe. You had reduced the living god who ordered their destinies to a sniveling petty-tyrant who wet himself with fear. You fled from them then in your moment of apotheosis, and emptied your stomach in the snowy courtyard.</p><p> </p><p>You did not look for your cousin. You did not think to look for him. You were nineteen and frightened, and you did not yet know that he was kin.</p><p> </p><p>If you did one kind thing for him—one kind thing for any of those boys—it was that when you quit the estate for the last time, you left its gates unlocked.</p><p> </p><p>Your voice fails; Edmund has taken your broad hand between his own, bless him.  Pearl bites the inside of her lips, waiting for you to elaborate.</p><p> </p><p>“If you left your cousin there,” Little Kate asks at length, “then how did he come to be buried in our back garden?” <em>Surely,</em> she seems to suggest, <em>you realized your mistake and went back for him.</em></p><p> </p><p>“He followed me,” you reply. “From a distance, mind—I hadn't any idea for the first few days. He didn't work up the courage to show himself until I'd traveled too far to return him to his masters.” You shiver to say so; but you'd hardly given him reason to think better of you. “I wouldn't have done so; I'd like to <em>think</em> I wouldn't. I had my mother and sister to think of, but—well.” Your sister would have had it out of you sooner or later, and she'd have turned you out to sleep in the road if you'd dared purchase her comfort with another's misery.</p><p> </p><p>Edmund lets out a heavy breath, shaken but visibly relieved. “That's not so different from the story he tells.”</p><p> </p><p>You doubt it, but you do not say so. You were callow and intemperate and a thousand times thoughtless, and he was more badly injured than you realized. If not for the intervention of strangers, your petty neglect would have been the death of him.</p><p> </p><p>“I was lucky to have him by my side,” you admit instead. “I had never traveled any great distance by foot, much less in the dead of winter, and I was utterly unprepared. I had with me a small leather valise—” You point to the eastern corner of your study, where it lies tucked away beside your desk. “—packed with all the wrong things. My father's old Bible, a sheaf of stationary, a novel about a boy kidnapped by pirates. Three changes of clean clothes. My shaving kit. A locket, one of your Auntie Kate's, with a miniature of my father inside. The four shillings I had left to my name. I tucked my top hat under my arm; when the time came to leave, I could not find my hat-box.” You can almost smile at your own foolishness. Almost. “My cousin was a more practical sort. He'd stuffed the pockets of his oilskin with oatcakes and sausage and dried apples. Witch hazel for the cut he'd taken. Flint and tinder, too, and woolen gloves for the both of us—even a flask of brandy, though Lord knows how it came to be in his possession. He knew the land, and he knew privation, and he was...prodigiously talented. He will tell you that I saved his life, out there on the road—but truthfully, it was he who saved mine.”</p><p> </p><p>Between the four of them, your children seem to be having an impassioned argument comprised entirely of shrugs, glares, and cocked eyebrows. You can't quite tell the topic or your offspring's relative positions, but you are very nearly certain Pearl is winning. You are surprised, then, that it is Edmund who speaks.</p><p> </p><p>"It must be very difficult to talk about him," your son observes. "You must have often felt quite helpless."</p><p> </p><p>You cannot be certain of his words; you are flickering in and out of your body; but that seems to be the gist of it. He has hidden a hundred questions inside that bland statement.</p><p> </p><p>He wonders whether your cousin truly died of consumption, or if the adults in his family have concocted this fiction to protect some dangerous secret. He wonders whether the experiences of your youth have, as he fears, broken your faith in God. He wonders what it was like for you to have a small gift, something so easily overlooked, and to stand beside a man who was at once so strong and so vulnerable. He wonders how you came to be so close to your cousin—closer than a brother, closer even than a spouse. He wonders, in point of fact, just how close the two of you came to be. He wonders why, if your grief for your cousin lies so fresh upon your breast, you have never asked Little Kate to serve as your medium. He wonders what prevents you, still, from saying your cousin's name.</p><p> </p><p>You wonder the same thing yourself.</p><p> </p><p>“I was often less helpless than I felt,” you tell them. You do not know how to answer the rest. Perhaps it is better to dismiss your children for the night and answer their questions in the morning—preferably with Kate by your side.</p><p> </p><p>But your older daughter, keen to the danger that you will put an untimely end to this interview, blurts, “Tell us about your time on the road.”</p><p> </p><p>You utter a diffident syllable deep in your throat.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Pleeease</em>,” she begs, pressing her hands together as if in prayer. “You <em>can't</em> leave off there—I'll never manage to get to sleep if you don't—I'll be up all night thinking up all the ways your adventures might have gone, and when I doze off at breakfast and Mother is cross with me it'll be all your fault!”</p><p> </p><p>“Tell us what his gift was <em>really</em> like,” Dora adds.</p><p> </p><p>Pearl elbows her hard in the ribs. “Never mind <em>that</em>. Tell us how you came to have two shadows.”</p><p> </p><p>Every forest is Arden, your cousin said once. You had laughed and called it pithy, and called it sentimental nonsense, and mussed his hair so it stood up in patches like a mangy animal's. But you think you understand what he meant. When you try to talk about him, every question is the same question. Every story is the same story. But where to begin? The hazel wood? <em>King Lear</em>?</p><p> </p><p>The year without summer. Perhaps you should start there.</p><p> </p><p>No. You know where to begin.</p><p> </p><p>“Eleven years ago,” you tell your children, “there was no Arden.” They should not believe you; they should be fools if they did. The trees tower ancient and primeval, thrice as tall as your house. The loam is springy with centuries of fallen leaves. But what you are telling them is true all the same.  “There was no orchard, no hazel wood down by the road. There was a solitary oak tree, perhaps eighty or a hundred years old and mossy at its roots; and beneath it we'd buried my father.”</p><p> </p><p>When you brought your cousin from London to your childhood home—when he was ill for the last time—</p><p> </p><p>(No. When he was outgrowing his humanity so swiftly it frightened you. That is how it happened.)</p><p> </p><p>For a fortnight, you walked with him through these grassy hills and told him everything you could remember about your childhood. You strolled together down the cobbled Roman road with a bag of roasted hazelnuts between you, tossing the shells over your shoulder. Yours lay quiet in the dust. His swelled back into live seeds, and put down roots there in the hard-packed earth, and sent up green questing shoots while you watched.</p><p> </p><p>You never buried him. He lay there on the damp grass, so near your father's headstone, and told you his vision of the garden that was and ever will be, and whispered his last secret. He said that he was happy. That you had made him happy. That you must remember that, in all the years to come. Then the last of his humanity slipped away, and the earth swallowed up his bones, and a forest burgeoned into life all around you, and the air lay thick with birdsong.</p><p> </p><p>He did not die, your cousin; he became something else. He became Arden. He has watched over your family ever since.</p><p> </p><p>But you are getting ahead of yourself. There was so little strength left in him, that first awful January, when he fought the pigs for slops and slept with the dogs in a corner of the stables. His power lay dormant in the winters, and he suffered just as anyone else might. His joints stiffened and swelled like crabapples. He came inside for chores with chilblains on his hands and skin chapped raw from the cold. He nearly escaped your notice altogether. But when he breathed, the wind blew. When he closed his eyes it was night. And when he cried out to Heaven—</p><p> </p><p>(But you cannot tell them about that. That is a story you will take to your grave.)</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. "Blood and lymph and drowned lice in the water, and your mind so carefully blank."</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was two hundred miles to London and you had little but the clothes on your back, four shillings in your pocket, and a bellyful of youthful indignation. The wind had taken your hat within the first three miles—pity, it was worth a small fortune even this far from the city, and you'd hoped to barter it for coach fare in Greta's Bridge—and the snow was drifting almost to your knees.</p><p> </p><p>You would not have lasted the night if not for Old Browdie, as your children call him. You have always called him John, of course, but they reserve that title for his son. When you met him he was a corn farmer with quick dark eyes and an awkward crowlike gait, limbs too long for his body, and a handful of shrewdly managed investments.</p><p> </p><p>He rode you down in the fading evening to offer you a fat leather purse and his grandfather's carved walking stick. He'd laughed to hear of your altercation with the headmaster, and laughed harder at your embarrassment, and sworn his friendship ever after. He pointed you to a cottage some two miles down the road that rented beds to travelers for a nominal fee. For a little extra, the proprietors could be persuaded to forget your face.</p><p> </p><p>The aged couple was gruff with you, it turned out, but generous enough. When you left the next morning, you discovered they'd filled your coat pockets with oatcakes and roasted chestnuts.</p><p> </p><p>It would take you years to realize that Old Browdie knew your cousin was following you, and meant the walking stick for him. He could not be seen to offer the boy any help directly. He had to live among his neighbors, after all, and his wife-to-be was a childhood friend of the headmaster's daughter.</p><p> </p><p>That was the first time your cousin saved your life.</p><p> </p><p>The second night you sheltered in a barn a few hundred yards from the main road. The snow was still falling, though perhaps less bitterly, and your trousers were soaked through. You pulled on a pair more suited for church than weathering a storm of this magnitude, flung yourself into the nearest pile of straw, and fell into an exhausted sleep. The temperature dropped precipitously during the night; ice rattled the windowpanes, and the roof groaned under the extra weight.</p><p> </p><p>You woke a few hours before dawn. You were warm, you realized, truly and properly warm, for the first time since your exile to Yorkshire: it was the wrongness of the sensation that woke you. A woolen cap was pulled snugly down over your ears. You were wearing mittens, and a second pair of socks—and as for your greatcoat, someone had dried it thoroughly and tucked it around your shoulders. The straw was piled into a nest around you, and empty sacking layered like blankets over your coat.</p><p> </p><p>Shapes moved in the darkness, snuffling and sighing in their sleep. You had never been so close to a herd—this great mass of bodies, each with the strength to crush you a dozen times over, crowded into concentric rings about your makeshift bed. You lost your courage, then, and called out the only friendly name left to you.</p><p> </p><p>Your cousin hushed you. “'S only cows,” he whispered. “They do this anyway, when a bad storm comes through.”</p><p> </p><p>You breathed his name again, half-disbelieving. You could not see his face. After a moment, you mastered yourself. “Come kip under here with me. You've got to be freezing.”</p><p> </p><p>He slid down next to you; tears pricked the corners of your eyes. The thinness of his frame was a relief as much as an atrocity—you would recognize it anywhere. The reality of him, the simple animal fact of his body curled up shivering against your back, left you undone. His voice was rawer than you remembered, his jacket damp with fever. You realized with some discomfort that you had no idea whether he wanted to lay down beside a man he'd witnessed in deadly violence, or whether he'd merely obeyed out of habit.</p><p> </p><p>He must have felt your shoulders stiffen. “I'm sorry,” he choked, “I'll go.”</p><p> </p><p>“Don't.” The word was out before you could stop yourself. “I mean, don't go on my account. If <em>you</em> want to, obviously...yes, of course. Or else—that is to say, I could take a turn out on watch, let you rest up a bit. It's only fair.”</p><p> </p><p>He rested his forehead between your shoulder blades. Faintly, he shook his head. You held yourself very still. Moisture seeped through the back of your shirt. You tried to remember the last time you'd seen him tremble like this—there was more to it than the cold.</p><p> </p><p>“Are you badly hurt?” you asked at length.</p><p> </p><p>He was quiet for a moment. “Not badly, no,” he faltered. His breath tickled the back of your neck. “Are you angry with me?”</p><p> </p><p>You chuckled low in your throat. “<em>Angry</em> with you?—God Almighty, you <em>are</em> a silly fellow.” You rolled over to face him. “What reason on earth could I have to be angry with you?”</p><p> </p><p>“You <em>smell</em> angry,” he mumbled.</p><p> </p><p>You forced yourself to relax your shoulders. “I thought I'd lost you for good,” you admitted at last. Now he was here, you couldn't get him warm, and on top of it all you'd frightened him.</p><p> </p><p>He rested a hand on the side of your face, as though to reassure himself you were real. “You never lost me,” he told you firmly, “you only thought you had.”  Gently, as though you were a child, he brushed a callused thumb across your cheek. Your own father had done the same, once, when you were small and fretful. </p><p> </p><p>"But I should have brought you with me," you whispered, hoping he would hear the apology that tightened against your throat.</p><p> </p><p>"You promised you would meet me in the world," he said instead, "and now you have. Try to get some rest, Nicholas.”</p><p> </p><p>He fell asleep against you just like that, head tucked under your chin. You lay awake for some time after, listening to the low steady breathing of the animals and the occasional musket-crack of a tree shattering under too much ice.</p><p> </p><p>That was the second time he saved you.</p><p> </p><p>In the morning he laid out breakfast, hawthorn berries and juniper, twice-poached acorns, precious rings of dried apple, the last of the oatcakes, a handful of cress. In the night, he had dried your clothes between the mute beasts. You told him he was ingenious. He shrugged. “Better cows than pigs,” was all he could say on the matter.</p><p> </p><p>You were resolved to track down his next of kin, if for no better reason than to shame them for their neglect. One way or another, you swore, you would help him find his home.</p><p> </p><p>He brushed off your vain promises. “You <em>are</em> my home,” he told you. There was a stubbornness in him then that you had not reckoned on. Here, you thought, was a young man who could <em>choose</em> to misunderstand you if the mood so took him—and would, and knew it, and made sure you knew it too.</p><p> </p><p>So that was that. You were his home, and you were headed to London, and so was he.</p><p> </p><p>You started off not long after sunrise—and happily enough, all told. You had a friend, and coins in your pocket, and a better breakfast than you'd seen all month. His fever was down. Trees gleamed in the pale sunlight as though their branches had been dipped in glass. A hard crust atop the snow allowed you to walk easily upon it rather than picking your way through wagon ruts or trudging in thigh-deep drifts. Your cousin even taught you to find wintergreen berries. It was good territory for them, he said—you could tell by the birds. He pointed out a half-dozen different species, though he'd made up his own names for them.</p><p> </p><p>Lord, you thought, Kate was going to <em>adore</em> him.</p><p> </p><p>You passed a frozen pond just after lunch and tried to explain to him about ice skating. He didn't seem to believe you, but you were in high spirits and ill-inclined to put up with skepticism. You took him out on the ice, supporting him with one arm, and spent a happy half-hour teaching him to slide about on his boots.</p><p> </p><p>You were heading back to the main road when you spotted one of his piss-holes in the snow. You stopped. Your cousin limped up behind you, still panting with laughter after his exertions. “What is it?” he asked, the smile wilting from his face as he caught the tense set of your shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>You pointed. You did not know what else to do. He shrugged, forced a conciliatory smile, mumbled something about squandering daylight and miles to go.</p><p> </p><p>“You told me you weren't injured,” you said, as evenly as you could manage.</p><p> </p><p>“I'm <em>not</em>.”</p><p> </p><p>“You're passing blood with your water,” you observed with deliberate patience. Your own father had done the same, just before the end.</p><p> </p><p>It took him a moment to work out what you meant. When he did, his face went carefully blank. “For pity's sake, Nicholas, it's only been three days!”</p><p> </p><p>That settled it. “We are walking to the nearest inn and we are staying there—with you, my friend, on the strictest of bed rest—until you are quite well again.”</p><p> </p><p>“You can't afford it. For that price, you might as well take a coach straight back to London.” He glared at you then, as though you were being stupid on purpose.</p><p> </p><p>It was beneath your dignity as a gentleman to curse under your breath. You did so anyway. It had only been a month; you were still thinking like a rich man.</p><p> </p><p>“I'll be better in a day or two,” your cousin promised, more gently this time, “it never takes much longer than that. But if it makes you feel better we can set up camp early tonight—I've been meaning to catch us some fish.”</p><p> </p><p>You tried to take him at his word. By mid-afternoon, however, his eyes were bright and glassy with fever. A fresh snow had started to fall. You begged a ride from a newlywed couple in a horsedrawn sledge, and surprised yourself when you told them you were headed for the King's Head inn. All told, it was some fifteen miles out of your way, but they were able to drop you not four miles off with a nip of brandy and best wishes for luck. You slid an arm under your cousin's shoulders and half-dragged, half-carried him for the better part of an hour. The weather turned bitter. Snow froze in your beard and eyelashes.</p><p> </p><p>It occurred to you, belatedly, that he stood more in need of Old Browdie's walking-stick than ever you had.</p><p> </p><p>You don't remember the rest. There might have been an aging farmer with a face like a turnip who offered you a ride in his ox-cart—but you faced other squalls on your journey to London, and his act of charity might have punctuated any of them. It was already dark when you struggled up that last icy hill to the King's Head, saw the parlor-lights doused, and pounded on the ash-wood door with a cry of despair.</p><p> </p><p>“I am a friend of Mister Newman Noggs,” you shouted above the wind. “He said I might seek shelter here!”</p><p> </p><p>You stood there for some minutes, too cold even to shiver, your cousin half-conscious in your arms. Then a hatch slid open near the top of the door. “Did this Mister Newman Noggs say which castle stands nearest?” a man's voice inquired within.</p><p> </p><p>You struggled to remember—Barclay or Bartleby, something like that. “I have it all down in a letter,” you replied, nonplussed. “Please, sir, my friend is very ill.”</p><p> </p><p>“Leave off your foolin' and get them inside,” a woman's voice scolded. “Boy calls down a storm like this when he's feverish, imagine what will happen if we let him freeze to death on our doorstep.”</p><p> </p><p>You heard a bolt slide in its lock, the creak of a wooden bar. A moment later, you and your cousin tumbled indoors with a substantial quantity of snow. The woman wasted little time brushing the remaining rime from your clothes, hanging up your coats and hats, and ordering you to stamp your feet. She grabbed a broom and swept the snowdrift back outside, then shut and barred the door behind you. The front hall was utterly dark.</p><p> </p><p>“Boots by the door,” she instructed in a tone that brooked no argument.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes ma'am,” you murmured, despite yourself. You kicked off your own boots readily enough, but you had to help your cousin with his. The laces were frozen, and his knuckles swollen red and stiff under his mittens. The boots were better quality, you realized, than the mismatched pair he'd worn back on the estate, and they fit him properly. Someone had tried, clumsily, to make them look worn.</p><p> </p><p>“And they'll be needing a light, of course,” she said, turning briefly to the man—the innkeeper, you supposed, a broad bearded man with well-callused hands.  "You'll forgive us, of course, we only light the lamps when we're open for guests.</p><p> </p><p>The innkeeper uttered a shrill chirping noise in the back of his throat. A moment later, a match flared to life with a soft hiss. An oil lamp cast its buttery-gold glow over the entryway. You slipped your valise strap over your shoulder, pulled your cousin to his feet.</p><p> </p><p>The woman must have been older than you guessed. She'd left a walking-stick leaning beside the door, and she tapped it against the walls as she led you through an empty barroom to their private kitchen. The man chirped twice more, straightening tables and chairs as he passed. It was an unusually neat establishment, you realized—not a bottle out of place.</p><p> </p><p>The kitchen was larger than you'd expected, half taken up by coal-fired griddles and a claw-foot iron stove the size of a bedframe. A fire blazed cheerily in the hearth; the innkeeper settled you on a wooden bench beside it and tromped up a narrow staircase, clicking again in the back of his throat. Steam rose from your shirt. Your cousin dozed fitfully against you. The woman bustled back and forth through the kitchen, lighting cold stoves and hauling water by the bucketful from the back pantry. You thought you heard her counting under her breath.</p><p> </p><p>“Might I be of some assistance, madam?” you asked, remembering at last your manners.</p><p> </p><p>“You may put the kettle on and help your friend out of his clothes—what passes for them, anyhow.” She paused, her face clouding over in an expression of deep concentration. “Four,” she murmured to herself. “Demme it all, it <em>must</em> have been four.” She patted the low table til she came to the wall, then ran her fingertips along it to a shelf of jars. <br/><br/></p><p>The kettle you could manage without jostling your cousin overmuch. You suspected she was humoring you. You had never given a thought to servants before—or to innkeepers' wives, for that matter—but you felt strangely uncomfortable sitting idle while another saw to your needs.</p><p> </p><p>Perhaps it was your cousin's influence. He'd followed you about like a lost puppy during those last two weeks up on the estate—and taken a great many stripes in consequence, though you hadn't realized right away. Even after you begged him to stop, to visit you only in secret, you'd often come back from lessons to find your shirts washed and starched, your overcoat brushed, a fire built up in the corner stove.</p><p> </p><p>(This morning again he'd begged for you to take him as your personal manservant, and you understood, with an ugly chill, that he calculated his own value solely by his usefulness to his masters. “You will be my brother and friend,” you'd told him instead, dismayed by how his face fell at your pronouncement. “This world will deal with you as it does with me.” But you had posed him an impossible riddle; he would not rest until you let him carry your valise.)</p><p> </p><p>The innkeeper thumped back down the stairs with a dark bundle in his arms. He counted out a pair of nightshirts, two dressing gowns, and fresh stockings for the both of you. Then he chirped, emptied the firewood from a tin washtub, and brushed it clean of ash and splinters. Behind you, the lady of the house cleared her throat meaningfully; abashed, he stacked the kindling neatly by the wall and swept the remaining mess into the hearth.</p><p> </p><p>You opened your mouth to protest. The innkeeper arched his brows. “Does the colour not suit the young gentleman?—not that I would know, mind.”</p><p> </p><p>“Sir,” you managed around your shock, “I <em>couldn't</em>—”</p><p> </p><p>“They were my oldest's,” he returned gruffly, “and <em>he</em> ain't using 'em anytime soon.”</p><p> </p><p>Your gaze fell on the empty washtub. Gathering your last shreds of dignity, you replied, “What I mean to say is—forgive me if I've given the wrong impression—but we haven't money to spare for luxuries. A room and a meal is all we ask.”</p><p> </p><p>“You'll both of you have a good wash before I let you anywhere near my linens—yes, <em>you too</em>—and no arguments, you smell like a barnyard. I run a clean house, and I intend to keep it that way.” She ambled over and dropped a bundle of yellow herbs tied in cheesecloth into the tub. “There,” she said with some satisfaction. “That should numb the sting a bit, much as anything can. I shouldn't dare give him willow with a bleed like that, and we don't keep poppy in the house.” She passed a mug of hot cider into your hands, pursed her lips, and jerked her chin at your cousin. “I thought I told you get him out of his wet things.”</p><p> </p><p>You flushed. “Begging your pardon, ma'm, but is there a screen I might set up for him?”</p><p> </p><p>“It seems your friend—<em>Mister</em> Newman Noggs—neglected to tell you the most important aspect of the King's Head Inn,” she remarked with a wry smile. “We'll be wanting to examine that letter of yours directly.” She turned to the innkeeper with some sternness. “Solomon, I'll need you to help me with the pots, you know I can't see water once it's properly boiled.”</p><p> </p><p>Obediently, you opened your traveling case and extricated your father's Bible. You flipped to the book of Psalms. You'd been told they were a comfort in bereavement—and in a way they were, as you could run your fingers over the passages your father marked and read the notes he'd penned in the margins. You'd been using Newman's letter as a placeholder between Psalms 90 and 91, between which he'd scrawled, <em>for times of danger and uncertainty</em>. Remembering the couple's first absurd question, the one that had bought you shelter from an inclement night, you ran a quick eye over the postscript and announced, “Barclay Castle.”</p><p> </p><p>“Pardon?” the mistress of the house inquired.</p><p> </p><p>“This inn is in the vicinity of Barclay Castle—or the ruins of it, I suppose. I'll admit, I saw nothing of the sort on the journey.”</p><p> </p><p>The man's expression grew at once serious and unreadable. “Spell it,” he commanded.</p><p> </p><p>You complied, not a little baffled, then sipped at the cider. It wrenched from you an involuntary moan; you felt more human at once. You tried to rouse your cousin to drink down his portion, succeeding after a moment's sluggish protest. “If you don't mind me saying, I could set up a curtain for my friend, if there's no screen in the house.</p><p> </p><p>“He won't be needing one,” replied the innkeeper drily. The kettle emitted a shrill whistle. The woman tapped her way over to the fire, removed the steaming vessel to the nearest table, and plucked the letter from your fingers as she passed.</p><p> </p><p>Clearly, they weren't about to give your cousin his privacy. You hesitated a moment, mortified, trying to discern whether he'd be more shy of letting two strangers see his crooked legs or his crooked back. But the innkeeper's wife was right, you scolded yourself, the wet clothes <em>weren't</em> doing him any favors. “Shirt first,” you whispered to him, “or trousers?”</p><p> </p><p>“My shirt—” he whispered back, turning his face from you. “I can't, Sir—I've tried, but it won't—”</p><p> </p><p>You set your jaw, suppressed the wince trying to work its way up your neck. You were back to <em>Sir</em> again, when just this morning you were Nicholas. “It's all right,” you reassured him. “I'm offering to help you.” You reached for the buttons on his jacket and he flinched from you. “It's all right,” you said again, though you had a feeling that it wasn't, not really—but <em>needs must</em>, as they said in Yorkshire.</p><p> </p><p>You unbuttoned his jacket and this time he let you, though he gave vent to a low miserable whine when you eased it down over his shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>He was doing his best to please you, even now.</p><p> </p><p>The shirt beneath was yellowed and filthy, with stiff black stains down the back. It took you nearly a minute to place the smell. Wound care up at the estate had been brutal and efficient, especially when left up to the younger boys—cuts were smeared with brimstone and treacle, clotted with spiderwebs, and let alone to heal or fester as they would.  Usually, they festered.</p><p> </p><p>Gently, you lifted the hem of his shirt; he made a noise like a broken-legged dog and clung to you, then. “I won't look,” you promised him, but he pressed his forehead into the hollow of your clavicle and <em>begged</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Trousers, then.</p><p> </p><p>You knelt before him and peeled off his socks. He kept a hand braced against your shoulder. You turned your head; you had, after all, just given your word. The woman passed Newman's letter over the spout of her teakettle, and you found yourself too wrung out to protest. The innkeeper stumped back and forth, ferrying boiled water over to the steaming washtub, then tested the temperature with the back of his hand and added a fresh half-bucket of snow. It was ready, he told you. Shakily, you worked loose the knotted rope your cousin used for a belt and helped him to his feet. He stepped free of his garments. The shirt was enough, you hoped, to protect what was left of his modesty.</p><p> </p><p>Out in the parlor, a grandfather clock chimed six. “Too late for tea, I s'pose?” Solomon remarked dolefully.</p><p> </p><p>“Not too late to lay out tea and call it supper,” the woman replied, proffering the letter. “Here, dry your hands and have a read of <em>that</em>.” She rose and, counting her paces, bustled in and out of the larder with astonishing efficiency. You could not help it; your stomach gave loud complaint at the mention of a proper meal. Between trips, she stopped and passed you a pair of women's shears, suitable for dressmaking and the like. “You'll be needing those, I'll warrant,” she told you with some resignation.<br/><br/></p><p>The couple grumbled between themselves over bread and broth and onion poached in milk. The man paced in the dim kitchen, running his fingers over the letter and tutting to himself at each line.</p><p> </p><p>Your cousin braced himself against you as though you were partners in a waltz; you supported him as he limped over to the tub. You kept your gaze fixed firmly on his face. You had given your word you would not look. You had every intention of keeping it.</p><p> </p><p>Climbing in, he nearly lost his footing. You moved to catch him, ease him carefully into the water, and that was how you saw.</p><p> </p><p>(The backs of his knees. The <em>inside</em> of his thighs. And his feet—God, it looked like he'd walked to London and back with his boots full of broken glass.)<br/><br/></p><p>(The root cellar. God, the root cellar. While you sat scribbling at your desk in the dormitory, he was down there with—)</p><p> </p><p>(With—)</p><p> </p><p>(It wasn't the headmaster's style.)</p><p> </p><p>“I'll help you with your shirt now,” you said, and you were surprised at how calm you sounded.</p><p> </p><p>“You <em>can't</em><span>.</span>” His voice broke.</p><p> </p><p>“For goodness sake,” you protested, “what else is there left to see?”</p><p> </p><p>“It's not about that,” your cousin said. “You just...can't, that's all.”</p><p> </p><p>The shirt, you discovered, had to be cut off him. There was cloth worked into the scabs; you left great patches of it stuck to his skin. He huddled in the water, jaw set, looking anywhere but at you. Steam rose sharp and sweet and aromatic as sun-hot pine needles. You soaped a flannel and passed it to him.</p><p> </p><p>“Leave off on that for now,” the woman called to you. “Let the medicine do its work—I'll tell you when it's time.” She tapped over and passed your cousin a dish of soft onion—for fever, she said—then busied herself with the tea.</p><p> </p><p>Solomon brought you a plate piled high with buttered bread and cold beef and a half-dozen other delicacies. You wiped the soap off your hands and shoved a slice of bread into your mouth, grunting your thanks. Then the couple settled into the nearest chairs with their own meals.</p><p> </p><p>The woman cleared her throat. “Now then, to business,” she said briskly. “I am Sarah King, owner and proprietor of this establishment. This is my confederate, whom you may call Solomon. And you, I'm given to understand, are a young man of exceptional talent. You came up in one of the Yorkshire schools, yes?”</p><p> </p><p>You'd already opened your mouth to correct the misunderstanding when you realized she was speaking to your cousin. He eyed her warily and, when she persisted, offered a noncommittal shrug. He slurped at his onion like a common dullard.</p><p> </p><p>“I should imagine it wasn't much of a school, but they would have called it one,” she went on as though he'd given full answer. “Once you are well, I will want a full accounting of the place—but that can wait, of course. In the meantime, my associate and I are prepared to make a formal offer of hospitality. You will have our aid, shelter, and protection until such time as you are fit to travel. For your sake, we will extend the same courtesy to your companion, for all that he's a Nickleby.”</p><p> </p><p>“A Nickleby who's <em>crossed</em> a Nickleby,” Solomon added darkly.</p><p> </p><p>“That endears him to me somewhat,” Mistress King remarked, the corner of her mouth twitching with suppressed amusement. “Still, it will be risky to shelter him long.”</p><p> </p><p>Your cousin frowned and passed you his empty bowl. “Mister Nickleby has been very good to me, ma'am.”</p><p> </p><p>“Well, this Nickleby <em>is</em> a gentleman, and no mistake,” she replied in a tone that seemed to suggest the average gentleman would be unable to find his own face with a mirror and both hands. She turned to you with some sharpness. “Be that as it may, I expect you to refrain from thievery, drunkenness, and slovenly habits whilst under my roof.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>And</em> to pitch in on his fair share of the work,” Solomon added. “Make sure he's clear on that.”</p><p> </p><p>You graced them with your most courteous smile, acutely aware of your bedraggled state. “Naturally—but we are not without coin, of course. We intend to pay you fairly.”<br/><br/></p><p>“That is not how an oath of hospitality works, young man,” Mistress King said with some asperity.</p><p> </p><p>You coloured under your damp collar. “I apologize if I have given offense,” you replied, because that's what your father would have said. Your voice was still mild, like his. The brute in you, the one you hadn't known existed, had been wrestled back into its cage—and there it would stay, you promised yourself.</p><p> </p><p>Solomon offered up a smile, though he did not look at you. “You can pay us in information, boy, and we'll call that fair enough—provided you work, of course, and behave yourself.” He returned to his own meal, and after some time he got up to help Mistress King tidy away the mess.</p><p> </p><p>You tried to persuade your cousin to try little bites off your plate: half a boiled egg, a sliver of cheese, a ring of pickled onion. He picked at your offerings, complained that he was full, and finally pushed your plate away when you persisted. You sighed that just this morning, he'd told you he wasn't injured.</p><p> </p><p>“I <em>forgot</em>,” he grumbled, dabbing clumsily at his legs with the soapy rag. At length, he promised to tell you when he was next hungry, if it pleased you so to see him eating.</p><p> </p><p>It was better than being called <em>Sir</em>.</p><p> </p><p>You rolled up your sleeves, tested the water, and poured a warmer bucket into the bath. Your cousin gasped and gave a full-body shudder. The windowpanes rattled in a sudden gust. “Will you let me see to your hair?” you asked quietly. He might have recognized it as an olive branch, though perhaps he acquiesced as apology of his own. Gently as you could, you scrubbed his scalp and worked a comb through his matted tresses. Some of the elf-knots were intractable, and had to be snipped away with Mistress King's shears. He rested his head against you while you combed out several species of vermin. Gritty grey suds trickled down his neck; you wiped them away before they reached his shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>His hair, you discovered, was a light chestnut blond, barely a shade darker than your own. He held his nose and submerged himself to rinse off. The mistress gave you a bottle of evil-smelling brown oil and showed you how to work it through his hair—it would stain, she warned you, but it would kill any nits that remained in the roots.</p><p> </p><p>(You should have started on his back, then. The sores on his feet he could manage for himself, but his back— You were distracting yourself and you knew it.)</p><p> </p><p>(You could not put this off forever.)</p><p> </p><p>Instead you dried your hands and fetched the shaving kit from your valise. He craned his neck to watch you, and you gave him your most encouraging smile. “When you are well, I will teach you to do this for yourself,” you said, working up your lather in a shallow dish. You brushed it onto his face and neck, sharpened your razor, let him rest his head back against your chest. Your shirt was ruined already, you reasoned. Another brown splotch could scarcely harm it further. Worried he might startle, you let him see the blade and offered some pointless babble about the pleasure of a good shave.</p><p> </p><p>You needn't have fretted. He relaxed against you, nearly limp in the water; you had to support the back of his neck with your free hand. By the time you'd finished, rinsed your razor, and wiped his face clean, he was drowsing again.</p><p> </p><p>You nudged him awake and fetched the hand-mirror from your shaving kit. “Here,” you said, passing it to him. “When we go out in the world together, people will see two gentlemen with their whole lives before them.”</p><p> </p><p>He did not exactly admire himself; his face was all hard gaunt angles—though now, you realized, so was yours. He tilted the mirror so he could see both your faces side by side. He had Kate's button nose, your father's soft dark eyes. You might have been brothers.</p><p> </p><p>Sarah—no, Mistress King, you did not mean to think of her as Sarah—lay a hand lightly on your shoulder. “It's time,” she told you, though really it was past time, and no use pretending otherwise.</p><p> </p><p>“I can't,” you said.</p><p> </p><p>“I'll do it,” she informed you grimly, and there was something in the set of her mouth that told you she'd never expected you to go through with it. “What I need you to do is hold him.”</p><p> </p><p>You shook your head. You could not bring yourself to speak.</p><p> </p><p>But your cousin, damn him, thanked her for her help and laced his fingers through yours. “It's all right, Nicholas, you won't have to—I won't, you know, so that you'd have to—I can keep still on my own, without you,” he reassured you. He took both your hands; you did not pull away. You knelt there on the wet floor beside him, as though in prayer. He drew you close, forehead to forehead. “Just—stay here and talk to me,” he whispered. “Tell me about your family.”</p><p> </p><p>You nodded, trembling like he should have been, your eyes shut tight.</p><p> </p><p>(Blood and lymph and drowned lice in the water, and your mind so carefully blank.)</p><p> </p><p>(You might have told him about your father.)</p><p> </p><p>After, when—</p><p> </p><p>(No.)</p><p> </p><p>You can only say that there was an after.</p><p> </p><p>(Sitting by the fire with your face in your hands, no memory of bathing but your hair is damp and you no longer smell like an animal.  Your cousin resting upstairs, salved and bandaged and fever finally broken, no memory of carrying him up but he would never have let the innkeeper touch him.  The warmth of strong spirits in your belly, no memory of drink but your mind is hushed and your knees have finally stopped trembling.  Solomon settled across from you, sprawled like a king in Sarah's rocking chair, no memory of how they became<em> Sarah</em> and <em>Solomon</em> but the cut across your face has been seen to and he lit your pipe when your own hands proved unsteady.)</p><p> </p><p>It was Solomon who roused you, showed you the double shadow you cast on the floor—one straight and strong, the other bent and crooked.  And you knew that the second one was your cousin's, that he came looking for you because he knew that you were hurting.  "You mustn't let him do that," Solomon told you.  "It will make him very ill—it has made him ill already." </p><p> </p><p>They had laid him in an old-fashioned four-poster bed with heavy curtains drawn tight against a rattling draft. You only meant to sit by his bedside until his shadow had settled safely back into him, but he cried out in preternatural dread and the upper floors of the inn creaked and swayed in a driving wind, and you tossed open the curtains and caught his hand and spoke senseless wretched platitudes until he wept your name, weak with relief.  "I'm sorry," he stammered, once he had come more to his senses. "Only it was so dark, and I did not know where I was, and you were—"</p><p> </p><p>(<em>Gone.</em>)</p><p> </p><p>You understood something of his terror, then.  He'd once told you he had no one from home—living or dead—who would come to comfort him as he died, and that if they did, he would be frightened of them, for he would not know them.</p><p> </p><p>You slid into bed beside him and drew the curtains shut behind you.  He was on his stomach, propped carefully on pillows and bolsters so as not to aggravate his hurts.  You might have begged his forgiveness, then.  You might have, but you did not.  You lay close to the heat of him, to the animal fact of his body, your heart haunted, your throat thick with misery. “I should have stopped them,” you whispered miserably.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Now</em> who's a silly fellow,” he sighed, resting a hand against your aching chest. “You did stop them.”</p><p> </p><p>You were crying, softly. You couldn't remember the last time you cried in front of someone. He forgave too easily, you thought, or perhaps he still didn't understand. “I should have stopped them <em>before</em>.”  You didn't mean just the root cellar, but if you said another word you would forfeit all your dignity and wail.</p><p> </p><p>“You stopped them when you did,” he murmured sleepily, nuzzling closer to you in the dark. “You stopped them, and I never have to see them again. That's the part that matters.”</p>
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